I was honored to contribute a talk to a seminar on the ‘right to the city’ at the University of Vienna, Department of Political Science last Friday. I gave a short presentation on the growing housing problems in Vienna, situating them in a discussion about the specific institutional context of Vienna’s housing market. We had an inspiring round of debate afterwards with insightful questions and issues raised. The seminar was organized by Margarete Haderer, Department of Political Science. Here is a link to the program: https://ufind.univie.ac.at/de/course.html?lv=210056&semester=2017W

Together with my colleagues Roman Seidl and Leonhard Plank I have wrote a short piece on Airbnb in Vienna. It appeared in the montly journal “Wirtschaftspolitik Standpunkte” of the Austrian Chamber of Labor. We show how Airbnb in Vienna is not so much about “home-sharing”, as it is about commercial real estate development. The piece is in German.

I spent the last two days at an inspiring workshop on Airbnb in European cities. It was organized by Christian Smigiel and Angela Hof at the University of Salzburg, Geography Department. I went there together with my colleagues Roman Seidl and Leonhard Plank (TU Wien) to present our research on Airbnb in Vienna (wherebnb.in/wien).

The program included a diverse and inspiring set of speakers, who explored Airbnb in different European urban contexts from diverse conceptual and methodological vantage points. Cities included were, among others, Salzburg, Thessaloniki, Reykjavik, Palma de Mallorca, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Lisbon and Copenhagen. While focusing on short-term rentals primarily, we discussed broader issues related to the rise of urban tourism, how it fits into current urban change and restructuring, and what conceptual tools we need to make sense of it. I leave with my many questions and ideas for further work. Thanks to the organizers!

I’ve been involved in a research project on Airbnb in Vienna in the last months. Together with my colleagues Roman Seidl and Leonhard Plank (both TU Wien), we have analyzed the listings of the online platform in the city. The particular focus has been on the number and types of listings, the geographical distribution, as well as revenues generated by the hosts. An important part was also to estimate the impact of Airbnb on the local housing market.

Airbnb has rapidly expanded in many cities in recent years. Also in Vienna, the number of listings has skyrocketed. While in 2014 there were some 1.300 listings available in the city, in 2017 there were already 8.600. This amounts to a growth of 560%.

Airbnb claims that the platform enables residents to occassionally share a spare room in their home, or, at times, also their whole apartment. One of the key findings of our study is that a considerable share of Airbnb listings are not occassionally shared homes, but permanent holiday apartments. Of the around 8,500 listings in Vienna, some 70% are entire apartments. Of those, some 40% are permanently rented out holiday homes. In absolute numbers, we estimate that around 2,000 apartments in Vienna are permanent Airbnb homes. As these units are no longer available for regular renting, their removal affects the local housing market. This is particularly of concern as the permanent Airbnb aparments are highly concentrated in inner-city districts, where the pressure on the housing market is already very high. The removal of units from the regular rental market there will further push up rents and house prices.

The report of the study is available on an interactive website: http://wherebnb.in/wien/. For now only in German, but we are working on an English journal paper that I will share on here once published. The map below shows the density of Airbnb listings in Vienna, plotted on a 250x250m grid.